


The Great Goddaughter Caper

by kittydesade



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Burke isn't exactly Missing Persons, but when his sixteen year old goddaughter goes missing he can't exactly stand by and do nothing. Unfortunately, he can't exactly leave Neal behind, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Goddaughter Caper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/gifts).



Peter was pacing in his office when Neal arrived with the paperwork, one hand to the back of his head and brushing back and forth through his hair. No, scratching the back of his neck. His heels were coming down with more force than usual. Apart from being distracted, Peter was upset about something. When Neal had left five minutes ago, he had been lounging in his chair and fine.

"Is this a bad time?"

The older man's head jerked up. "No. No, come on..." He stopped as he realized who he was talking to and what they had been in the middle of, and glared at Neal.

Neal's grin was less impishly triumphant than it might have been had Peter not looked genuinely agitated. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. You got the Greenlaw file?"

Now Neal was curious. "Right here," he held up the folder, just out of Peter's reach considering he was keeping the table between them. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

Peter's lips thinned into an irritated line before he looked down and resumed pacing, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. "It's Emma."

"Your girlfriend?" Neal's eyes sparkled.

"_No._ My goddaughter. She's missing."

All airs of teasing fled the room. "How old is she?" Neal tossed the file onto a pile of like-colored paperwork and ignored it in favor of firing questions at Peter, who was still pacing. "How long has she been missing? Have her parents called the police?"

"Mother. She lives with her mother, her father died eight years ago. She's sixteen." Peter blew out a sigh and came to a temporary stop in front of Neal, head tilted to the ceiling again and eyes closed. His fingertips scrubbed over his eyelids. "She's sixteen, and she's been gone for two hours. Police are just saying that she's lost track of time and she'll be home soon."

Neal started to relax and opened his mouth. Peter caught the look.

"And no, it's not like her to be gone for two hours, not with... Not when her mother's waiting for her to come back from ballet camp."

That didn't sound like worried Peter, or stressed Peter, both of which Neal was familiar with as being the cause of at least a good portion of that worry and stress. That sounded like defeated Peter, with which Neal was unfamiliar.

"What happened?"

Peter sighed. "Her mother was supposed to meet her at their place after ballet camp so they could go to dinner. It's a weekly... thing. Emma was supposed to take the bus home, and then Rebecca was going to take them out to eat."

"All right, so..." Neal's eyes darted over his mental map of the city overlaying the table in front of him. "She left ballet camp. And Rebecca confirmed this?"

Peter nodded. "When her daughter wasn't there when she got home, Rebecca called the camp to make sure Emma had left, just in case, I don't know. Some classes ran late. They said she'd left, same as usual, picked up her usual bus right outside the studio. One of the other girls saw her get on."

"And the police just think she's run off, they're not going to take this seriously until she's been missing for twenty-four hours." Neal bit his tongue on that particular policy, but he could understand.

"It's not a hard and fast rule, but with most teenagers, that's what they go by."

Neal's gaze went away as Peter's focused on the man in front of him; he came back as Peter was about to say something else. "All right. Let's go talk to the Mom."

Peter grabbed his coat, grumbling. "You sound like a TV cop. And that's a good friend you're talking about..."

  
It was a tense car ride, so Neal refrained from teasing Peter about his rather lovely, very female friend. He thought this was a good gesture of restraint, especially when Peter showed him some of the pictures on his phone of the girl and her mother. Neal confined himself to a 'huh' and questions more relevant to the missing girl.

"So, tell me a little bit about her."

"About Rebecca?" Peter gave him an annoyed look. "She's a friend, an old friend from college, she..."

"About Emma." You idiot. But it was a fond _you idiot_ sort of tone.

"Oh. Ah..."

Neal waited. Women in general were not Peter's strong suit, not as far as they were women, anyway. He'd thought of suggesting that Peter just think of them as people a couple of times, before he realized that would never work. Too much chivalry. Peter thought through another couple of yellow lights and then shrugged.

"She's a sixteen year old girl. She likes ballet, going to the movies. She likes horses, the Jonas brothers..."

"She sounds like a Tom Petty song. Come on, you've got to know something about this girl, she's your god-daughter."

"I'm thinking!" Underscored by a car horn registering a complaint at the way Peter slammed on the brakes too hard.

"You could have made that."

"Shut up."

More thinking. They sped through traffic, for a very New York value of speeding. "She's a pretty normal sixteen year old girl. She goes to ballet camp, goes to school. On scholarship, she's a bright girl."

Neal was at least starting to get a whole picture of the girl, instead of a lyrical stereotype. He nodded. "Okay, so she likes to study, keeps her grades up?"

"Yeah. She doesn't party too much, and when she does it's mostly with her ballet friends or her horse friends. She works at the stables some. Usually that's what she does in the summer, since starting high school, this year there was a dance camp and she talked her mother into ..."

Peter trailed off. His eyes had gone distant again, hands tight on the steering wheel. Too vague to be something about the case, so Neal cued him to start talking again.

"Into signing her up. Okay, so. She's into the arts, she's physical, and she studies. She does have friends, though, so she's got a social life." Neal frowned. She did sound like a pretty typical teenager, at least as far as he could describe her with what he had, and that didn't lead him to any big conclusions this early on. Maybe her mother could offer some insight. "And she's punctual, she calls her Mom, isn't usually late without good reason, doesn't ... you know, just, wander off?"

"Not until today."

They were both quiet for the rest of the trip. Neal couldn't think of anything more to add, ask, or offer until they had a chance to meet with the mother and he got a look at what the girl's life was like. Peter was too caught up in his own nightmare images, which both men guessed would be only a fraction of the ones Rebecca was coming up with.

They pulled up in front of the house and got out of the car without looking at each other, Peter hunched over and Neal staring out and up. There was a plainclothes car in evidence in front of where Peter had parked. Neal didn't think he'd noticed.

"Twenty four hours?" he asked, catching Peter's elbow with his hand as the older man rang the doorbell. Peter blinked at him, and he nodded over at the car.

"Yeah..." Small frown in that direction, then his attention locked on the door again as footsteps approached. "That's what I thought."

"Huh."

  
"Detective Clayton, Detective Jones."

"Agent Peter Burke."

Neal stood back and watched the greeting ritual of the law enforcement officials take place. As an outside observer it was kind of fascinating. They smiled over at him, taking him for one of their own. Which would last all of two minutes, if he was lucky.

"This is Neal Caffrey."

Two seconds, then. Peter introduced him without a second glance and went straight to business. "So the police _are_ investigating?"

Detective Jones smiled. Neal wasn't sure he liked the look of that smile. "Mrs. Linhardt indicated that her daughter wasn't the kind of girl to run away from home like this, out of the blue; we figured we could at least get some preliminary work going."

Which was bullshit, and by the tightness of the smile on Peter's face as he nodded, his partner knew it. More likely she had talked about knowing someone in the FBI who would help, especially if she had called Peter at the office, and they had caved rather than have the feds horning in on their territory. Inter-agency cooperation at its finest.

"And did you come up with anything?"

Neal amused himself half listening to the conversation and filling in his own peanut-gallery comments in his head while he looked around the living room. Rebecca gave him a curious look but stopped when he put his detective face on. Shoulders back, stiffness in his posture, walking with one ankle and one side ever so slightly weighted, like he had a gun and a backup on. It was funny how few people realized that the little details made a difference.

On both ends.

He leaned in and frowned at one of the photographs on the mantel. Emma, or at least a girl who looked so much like Rebecca that she had to be Emma, same straight blonde hair, same facial structure, same pale eyes. Two other girls were in the picture, friends, by the way they all had their arms around each other, one of them in what looked like a school uniform with two piercings in each ear and her blouse pulled up to reveal a bellybutton ring twinkling at the camera. The other just in jeans and a t-shirt.

"Mrs. Linhardt..." Neal looked over, catching the attention of the woman as well as the three detectives. He smiled, bright and wide-eyed and apologetic and young. "Sorry... does your daughter keep a scrapbook... a yearbook, a digital camera, something that has pictures of her friends?"

"I... yes. But she's not with any of her friends, I called..."

"I understand, ma'am, if you could get that for me..."

Smooth and sure of himself, pretty and smiling. It was so much easier to get away with stuff like this when they thought he was young. Even Peter thought of him more as a misbehaving younger brother. Age conferred upon them wisdom, in their minds; it made them turn back to their conversation about how the case was going as he took the camera from Emma's mother, nodded and smiled.

The camera was a gold mine of information. She hadn't deleted her pictures for a couple of weeks, and both her friends were on it, as well as several others. As well as, he saw, an older looking man in ratty clothes and an oil-stained garage uniform. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't scowling, either. And he was pushing thirty, far too old to be around high school students. Definitely far too old to have one on his lap.

"What is it about guys and schoolgirl uniforms," Neal muttered.

"Excuse me?"

Detective Jones had heard him. He had a smile for that guy, too, that wide-eyed disingenuous one, but this detective was giving him a look like he knew him. "Neal Caffrey... I know that name, don't I? Bond forgery, wasn't it? Suspected of racketeering, art theft, counterfeiting..."

Rebecca Linhardt's pained look at Peter was more offensive than the detective's sneering tone; the smile dropped away. "I'm working with the FBI, now," he held up a hand to stop the list of his many and varied misdeeds, mostly because he couldn't deny them. Unless they'd come up with some new ones since he'd been working with Peter.

"Well, you're still not working missing persons, unless I missed a memo?" Detective Jones straightened up and gave Peter a rebuking look. So, a nice guy, but one who had a burr up his butt about where the line between criminals and cops was drawn.

It didn't matter anyway; Neal had an idea of what was going on. "That's all right, we were just leaving." Peter's mouth dropped open to protest. "Peter? We're leaving." Eyes flickering at the door, chin tilting a fraction of an inch up, down, and centered.

Peter's eyes narrowed. The protest turned into a smooth, apologetic half-smile for Rebecca and a barely-polite nod for the detectives. "Good luck with your investigation," Peter said, and made sure Neal preceeded him out the door.

  
"What was that about?"

Neal's step was light and more on his toes as they headed back to the car and got in. "I have a theory. Do you know where ..." He opened the camera again.

"You _took_ her camera?"

"I'll give it back. Do you think you can find out where this garage is?"

Peter leaned over at the next red light, frowning. "Garage, I don't..."

"The guy's shirt. That's a garage shirt, here, you can see it better..." Tabbing through the pictures, he managed to find one where the girl's head wasn't obscuring the logo. The guy wasn't smiling in most of them, either. "That is the boyfriend of one of her best friends, look. He's all over her, and she's in most of these pictures."

Peter divided his attention between the road and the camera as they crept along through the city, driving, Neal presumed, back to the office.

"Jay's Auto Repair?"

"It must be where he works. Some of these pictures are datestamped last weekend, and he's still wearing the shirt. And I'm pretty sure some of these were taken outside the garage, look," Neal pointed, realized Peter was looking at the road right at that moment, and stopped. "Or, you know..." As Peter screeched the brakes again. "Keep your eyes on the road, but. That's someone's car lot. It makes sense."

Peter shook his head. "I don't know... if she was just going to her friend's, why wouldn't she tell her mother? Why wouldn't she tell her in advance?"

"If she was going because her friend called her with an emergency, she wouldn't. Especially when her friend's boyfriend is, what, thirty?"

Peter did look over to see the next photo at that, face wrinkling up in a grimace. "That's... god. He's going out with a sixteen year old?"

"At least, although she goes to a different school, so..." Neal shrugged. "I don't know. Personally, I don't find sixteen year olds very appealing..."

He could feel the glare even when Peter was staring at the road.

"Not helping?"

"Not really."

Liar. The banter helped. Eased them both, was more usual and made things more familiar, less scary. Having some idea of where to go helped even more. Peter wouldn't say it, though. It didn't matter, Neal could read his hands smoothing over the steering wheel and the tension fading somewhat around worried brown eyes. "So. Jay's Auto Repair."

"Want me to get an address?"

His mouth twitched. "An address would be nice. Directions would be even better."

Neal resisted the urge to laugh. Peter looked so relieved, and it was good to see. "Address and directions, coming right up."

  
The ambulance had rolled away before either of them got a chance to talk to Emma for more than five minutes. Neal still wasn't sure how Peter had gotten her mother to stay put and wait for them to bring her home. "You must be really good friends."

"We go back," was all Peter said. He was watching the two girls, hands on his hips, looking as uncomfortable as he always got around weeping women. Apparently it didn't get any easier when they were just about young enough to be his daughters, though Neal suggested he just treat the two girls _as_ girls and comfort them in a fatherly way. Peter had rolled his eyes at the younger man and pointed out that he didn't even have kids.

After a few minutes of sobbing and teenage hysterics a distractingly beautiful woman showed up for the friend, thanked the two of them and escorted her daughter out of the garage. Neal was at least as curious about why she didn't seem upset that her daughter was dating a grown man as who she was and where she had been headed to in that evening gown.

"Dee's Mom?" Peter asked. Neal noted that his married colleague's eyes tracked her as well, a little more than necessary.

Emma nodded. Her fingers played with the zipper on her jacket, rising up and down on her toes in a way that would break those sneakers straight across the arch within a year, Neal noticed. Definitely in ballet camp.

"Is Mom really mad at me?" she asked, squinting up at Peter with the look that most children gave adults they thought would be upset with them.

Peter sighed, hands in his trenchcoat pockets, and shook his head. "She'll just be glad you're home safe. You really scared her..."

"You know, you could have just called 911," Neal interrupted, since Peter was playing the role of the parent. "Driven up..." he assumed one of the girls knew how to drive. "And dumped him outside a hospital. 's what most people do when they don't want the hospital to..."

Peter was glaring at him.

"Your godfather's going to kill me, isn't he?"

Emma was giggling, which was a better sign than the wide-eyed worry of a few minutes ago. "Not if you don't stop talking about Dee's friend and dumping people out of cars in front of hospitals."

"Okay, then." He slung an arm around her shoulders and began steering her to the car, ignoring Peter making fish mouths and looking indignant. They both ignored the throwing up of hands and slap-brush of palms against trenchcoat, as well as the huffy noise. "Come on, tell me about Dee's friend. He's not prone to seizures, is he?"

"No..." she shook her head, back to frowning again and leaning into him a bit. That alone was cause for concern, considering she had just met him and seemed like an otherwise sensible girl. "I mean, she said he'd had a couple blackouts when he first moved here, but the way she was talking I thought it was just getting really drunk."

"Apparently not," Peter said over their shoulders. He came around them to the driver's side of the car, directing a glare Neal's way. "Look, the next time something like this happens, _call_ me? Please? You'll save your mother a lot of grief. _What._" That last directed at Neal, again, because Neal was giving him a tilted-head look of quasi-disapproval. And managing not to roll his eyes by sheer force of will.

Emma, at least, explained for the law-abiding and dodgy-behavior impaired. "Peter, I didn't call her because when she found out about Dee and her boyfriend, she'd go nuts. I mean, what would you do if your daughter was..."

Neal tried to stop her with that flat hand over the throat thing, but Peter glared at him and let her keep going.

"... seeing a twenty-nine year old?"

There was one of those silences that just begged for a laugh track, or an audience going 'oooh.'

"Get in the car."

Neal followed her slink of shame into the front passenger seat. "Peter, I really think you're being too..."

"Neal!"

"Shutting up."

  
It was after dark and after dinner by the time they got away from Rebecca's place. The way the day had gone, though, Neal had the idea that Elizabeth would forgive him for not calling to say he'd be late for dinner.

"I still think you're overreacting."

"He's thirty!" Peter hadn't let it go since they'd driven away, and now that they were a few blocks from June's place he didn't show any signs of stopping. Neal thought it was cute. Not that Peter would appreciate the sentiment. "And what kind of guy dates a seventeen year old at thirty, anyway?"

"Kate's younger than I am..."

"By two years."

Elizabeth was younger than Peter, too, but he didn't point that out. "From what little I saw of her, Dee seemed very mature for her age," he shrugged.

Peter pointed the angry finger at him. "That's not the point. The point is that she's seventeen, and she's a high school student. It's not legal, and it's not even ethically..."

"And she's not your daughter. Or your goddaughter. She's a young woman you met today, and you don't know anything about her other than that she's Emma's friend," Neal pointed out, serious, now. "You don't even know they're having sex, and it's not illegal for a seventeen year old to have contact with a twenty nine year old..."

Peter grumbled something that sounded like _oh whatever_ and threw up his hands, slapping the steering wheel on the way down.

"... and from the way Emma sounded talking about him, they've been seeing each other for almost a year. That's longer than most high school relationships."

"Oh, and what do you know about high school relationships?"

"I was probably in high school a lot more recently than you." And there wasn't much Peter could say to that, to Neal's amusement.

They pulled up outside of the house still bickering at least in posture and attitude, if not in words. Neal waited to open the door until Peter came out with his last outburst, which he seemed to be turning around in his head.

"You know, just wait till you have kids, okay? Then you'll understand."

Predictable retort. Which deserved an equally predictable, if still amusing response. "Do you really want to see me raising kids?"

His partner opened his mouth to reply, then thought about it.

"Good point, huh?" Neal grinned.

"Get out of my car."

He was still laughing as he headed upstairs to tell June what had happened.


End file.
